Design Exposition Discussion Documents for Rich Design Discourse in Applied Visualization
Beecham, R., Dykes, J., Rooney, C. & Wong, W.
We present and report on Design Exposition Discussion Documents (DExDs), a new means of fostering collaboration between visualization designers and domain experts in applied visualization research. DExDs are a collection of semi-interactive web-based documents used to promote design discourse: to communicate new visualization designs, and their underlying rationale, and to elicit feedback and new design ideas.
Developed and applied during a four-year visual data analysis project in criminal intelligence, these documents enabled a series of visualization re-designs to be explored by crime analysts remotely – in a flexible and authentic way.
The DExDs were found to engender a level of engagement that is qualitatively distinct from more traditional methods of feedback elicitation, supporting the kind of informed, iterative and design-led feedback that is core to applied visualization research. They also offered a solution to limited and intermittent contact between analyst and visualization researcher and began to address more intractable deficiencies, such as social desirability-bias, common to applied visualization projects. Crucially, DExDs conferred to domain experts greater agency over the design process – collaborators proposed design suggestions, justified with design knowledge, that directly influenced the re-redesigns. We provide context that allows the contributions to be transferred to a range of settings.
Citation and full paper:
Beecham, R., Dykes, J., Rooney, C. and Wong, W. (2020). Design Exposition Discussion Documents for Rich Design Discourse in Applied Visualization, IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics, doi:10.1109/TVCG.2020.2979433.
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